Case Study Part 2: Process Flow Diagram Analysis

The diagram was a challenge but I will persevere!

 Well it took me longer than a week to post the results of my process flow diagram experiment and for that I apologize. I will not bore you with excuses. 

A quick recap for those who did not read Part 1 of this Case Study.  I submitted a proposal to my boss to add a process walk through conversation with the customer during the project kick-off, 2-day discovery meeting.  This meeting is currently driven almost exclusively by a question and answer tool and resulted in a very stale and stunted meeting.  My aim was to engage the customer by asking them to tell the story of their current process, which I would capture using a swim lane type model I had developed, for delivery with the Business Requirements Document. 

The pilot overall went well, however it was a challenging meeting as the customer was not engaged in the process and had provided little documentation beforehand to help me lead the discussion.  But it did achieve some of the goals I had set for the experiment, which were: 

• Provide a framework for a free-flowing discussion.
• Elicit requirements that are missed by the basic question & answer format.
• Allow the diagram to be constructed as the discussion took place.

The challenges I experienced were: 

• The customer was small and the process being described, although with many parts, was all conducted by one person.  Therefore the customer found it difficult to talk through the process in a more abstract way, linking one section to another.  This highlighted that I had designed the process with a larger customer in mind and would need to tailor it to a small company setting.
• Creating the diagram neatly, on the fly, was difficult.  The meeting was conducted in a restaurant and I had to do the diagram just with a pad and pen.  I had not prepared for this correctly, not knowing the setting of the meeting until we arrived, and needed a portable whiteboard, or just plain paper and a pencil would have been better.  I will certainly be more prepared next time. 

I will persevere with this method however and continue to work on refining it.  My boss is still certainly on board with the idea. 

Once again it demonstrates the power of iteration, and learning from your experiences.  I will do this again at the next meeting and I will now have these lessons learnt and will start from a stronger position.  I am striving to make sure I personally review my work  and learn from my mistakes.  An internal heuristic walk-through of my work output if you will.  I must embrace my mistakes and challenging experiences and see them as a valuable part of learning. 

Thanks again for reading!

Case Study Part 1: Adding a process flow diagram to a Q & A driven requirements process

I recently suggested to my boss a way to incorporate a process flow diagram technique in to our requirements gathering process. She liked the idea and allowed me to run a pilot at my last requirements gathering meetings. This is Part one of two articles documenting my experience.

As an Implementation Consultant for a SaaS product, the big kick-off for each project is a 2-day meeting at the customer site. This is a requirements gathering session driven entirely by an online tool that ensures I ask all the critical questions so I can generate the Business Requirements Documents and have the product configured. This question & answer, tool driven process is part of a broader Six Sigma, repeatable and reliable implementation path that the company has invested heavily in over the recent past. This in turn generates lots of data points, measurable and reportable milestones which the QA team use as a stick to beat us lowly Implementation Consultants with when we don’t meet them

However I felt as though this drive towards fully quantifiable actions and processes had resulted in a very stale and un-engaging requirements meeting. The tool forced the meeting away from a qualitative semi-structured discussion, in to a repetitive question and answer session…for two days!!

• Where was the consultative approach our implementation procedure and job title highlights?
• Where was the business process analysis?
• Where was the free-flowing discussion and use of more traditional BA methods of enquiry and elicitation?

My concerns at this particular issue possibly taps in to a broader problem of operational efficiency programs, such as Six Sigma, throttling fuzzy, qualitative procedures, but that was not my problem to address.  However I saw a great opportunity to include a visualization technique to capture the customers existing workflow that would be directly affected by the new software I am implementing. What I proposed was a business process diagram method, but what that would look like I had no idea at the time.

The key objectives were:

1. It must be quick and simple to draw / develop in real-time in front of the customer.
2. It must generate discussion and allow the customer to walk through the process, as it exists today, with no consideration for how it will change with the new software, or more in-depth technical considerations.

Process Flow Diagram Example

This is the example I developed after some online research (thanks to David Morris @GreySkinnedBoy on Twitter for pointing me to the BPMN) and showed to my boss. It builds on a swim lane type method although it will not conform to the linear timeline aspect normally the case with swim lane diagrams.

My hope is that this high level overview and story telling on the customer’s part will elicit requirements that would normally go undiscovered until later in the process. I also want to create a then and now document so the customer will know how the process will look at the end of the implementation, as well as a proposed process flow diagram if efficiency saving options are open following analysis after the meeting.

Overall I hope the introduction of a visual artifact will offer both value to the customer, improve the requirements gathering process and offer more opportunity for real value add consultative work.

Look out for Part 2 next week to see how the pilot went.